Jim, From Telegraph review of same book.

"Hastings's second adversary is more amorphous: what he calls "the poets' view" of the war as a futile struggle for a few blood-drenched yards of mud, which wasted a whole generation, solved nothing and which Britain should have steered clear of, allowing those funny foreign fellows to slaughter each other without compromising its splendid isolation.
This view, propounded by various powerful voices from the great economist John Maynard Keynes in 1919 down to the scriptwriters of the television comedy Blackadder Goes Forth, has been hammered so relentlessly into our heads that it is now the received opinion on the war. So much so that the government seems unsure how to mark next year's centenary of the conflict, both for fear of upsetting the Germans and because British public opinion generally regards it as a senseless, unmitigated tragedy.
Hastings, who received a knighthood in 2002, will have none of that.